With Sonnet 111, William Shakespeare shifts focus from his infidelities in relation to his younger lover, addressed in the previous two sonnets, to a general deficiency in his reputation, which he blames squarely on the fact that his circumstances require him to earn a living in the public sphere.

This, he claims, has led him to acquire the conduct of a person who attracts opprobrium, and while proposing to subject himself to whatever 'medicine' or 'penance' may be required of him, he sees and seeks his remedy first and foremost in the younger man's pity. This, he assures him, will suffice to cure him of any ills he may suffer resulting from any such misdeeds as come with the lifestyle his fortunes have imposed on him.

With his exceptionally candid and forthright Sonnet 110, William Shakespeare at once completes his apotheosis of his young lover, while at the same time confessing to him that yes, he too has had affairs with other people, but also reassuring him that these other lovers were no match for him and that they pale, compared to him, into insignificance, seeing that he is as "a god in love" to whom our poet feels and here declares himself to be inseparably tied.

Sonnet 109 is the first of two truly remarkable sonnets that speak of William Shakespeare's own infidelities towards his young lover during a period of prolonged absence.

Although they do not form a strictly tied pair, together these two poems position our poet and his relationship in an entirely new light, because they for the first time genuinely acknowledge that he, too, like his young lover, has succumbed to temptation elsewhere while they were apart, but they both affirm him to be the only one who ever mattered and the one who truly matters now.